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told you, but let me tell you something my Papa told me when I was your age. He told me that there was never any way of gettin’ out of pain in this life. Adam and Eve saw to that. Because the Lord needs us to know pain. That’s part of the test. So while I can’t make your pain go away, I can tell you that we’re all gonna be judged by how we bear that pain, and use it, and do the Lord’s will because of it. Do you understand?”
    I didn’t. Mama and Papa had been physicists. Our family never went to church. Tab’s talk sounded like something out of a history book about the days when people thought religion was more important than science. It was foreign in my ears and made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t deny the earnestness with which Tab had spoken. Nor could I deny the heart-felt kindness in her expression.
    My tears flowed like a river, and I stopped trying to wipe them away.
    Irenka would have liked Tab. It was a crime that Irenka wasn’t here.
    I blubbered something to that effect, and then I felt myself whisked up into Tab’s arms, almost crushed by the woman’s surprisingly strong embrace.
    It was the first time anyone had held me—really held me—since Papa.
    I bawled into Tab’s shoulder, and she just kept holding me, singing a soft song under her breath that I would later learn was a hymn.
    • • •
    I chose to stay, of course.
    And Tab and I talked about the Outbound.
    “So where do we start?” I asked Tab. “We can’t just search blindly.”
    “The largest group of Outbounders was said to have followed in the wake of Pioneer 10. Can we do the same, Howard?”
    “Let me see if I have the file on that,” Howard’s voice spoke from the speakers in the ceiling. “Oh, here it is. Yes, I think we can do that. It’s lucky for us we came out of the slingshot when we did, or we’d be going in the totally opposite direction. We’ll have to wait awhile longer before I can risk a second burn. We’re not far enough away for Jupiter yet.”
    “No problem,” Tab said. “I think time is the one item we’re not going to run out of.”
    She wasn’t kidding. Even with constant thrust, it took two months to cross the orbit of Pluto, and another eight to get as far as the inner limit of the Kuiper Belt. The observatory was well suited to long voyages. A plentiful fuel reserve, in the form of antimatter, provided power while a large hydroponics facility kept the air clean. Tab trained me to service the various automated and manual life systems of the observatory, and we inventoried and re-inventoried all the consumables and spare parts. With Howard’s help we drew up graphs and charts to see just how far we could stretch our resources.
    Barring damage to the observatory, and with regular burns for course correction, Tab and Howard estimated we could go twenty years before running out of anything important. Even if the main reactor failed, a backup radioactive decay generator could provide full internal power for another ten.
    Shutting down everything but the bare minimums increased these time frames by a factor of three. Which meant all we had to do was keep the hydroponics farm healthy, and Tab and I would have enough food to eat and air to breathe for decades.
    Decades. My soul chilled at the thought of such a long, lonely voyage.
    Howard stopped monitoring the inner solar system at sixteen months. There were no more human cries for help. All that remained were the automated signals of the few surviving death machines, each acting out its programmed orders regardless of the fact that the men and women who had given those orders were gone.
    No other automated ship-to-ship communications were intercepted either, though if anyone else had survived and fled, they had likely done so in the same manner as we: deliberately silent.
    Several times, Tab and I debated turning back.
    But as the kilometers between Earth and the observatory grew, the very thought of going home became abstract. We were now